June 24, 2013

FBI: Rodney King was right: Angelenos can all just get along!

A press release from the FBI shows the vibrant diversity and diverse vibrancy of 21st Century Los Angeles. (I'll put the names of the accused in bold.)
Twelve Los Angeles-Area Residents Accused of Attempting to Bilk Medicare of $22 Million Arrested as Part of Nationwide Crackdown  
U.S. Attorney’s Office

LOS ANGELES—Twelve Los Angeles-area residents—including California’s second-largest biller for chiropractic services, a physician’s assistant, and owners of durable medical equipment (DME) and ambulance companies—were taken into custody today in relation to seven criminal cases that allege they cumulatively submitted more than $22 million in false billings to Medicare....  
Dr. Houshang Pavehzadeh, of the Sylmar Physician Medical Group, allegedly billed Medicare more than $1.7 million for chiropractic treatments he never performed. During the scheme, which ran from 2005 through 2012, Dr. Pavehzadeh, 40, of Agoura Hills, became the second-largest Medicare biller in California for chiropractic services—even though he was not in the United States when some of the alleged services were performed. In addition to being charged with health care fraud, Pavehzadeh is charged with aggravated identity theft related to Medicare beneficiaries whose information he used to bill Medicare as a part of the scheme. When investigators tried to conduct an audit of Pavehzadeh’s claims, he falsely reported to the Los Angeles Police Department that he had been carjacked and that patient files requested by the auditors had been stolen from his car. Pavehzadeh surrendered this morning, and he is scheduled to be arraigned with other Los Angeles-area defendants this afternoon in the Roybal Federal Building. 
Nine defendants affiliated with DME companies were also charged in five separate indictments. 
Olufunke Fadojutimi, 41, of Carson, a registered nurse; Ayodeji Temitayo Fatunmbi, 41, formerly of Carson and now believed to be residing in Nigeria; and Maritza Velazquez, 40, of Las Vegas, were charged with health care fraud. The scheme allegedly revolved around Lutemi Medical Supplies, a DME company Fadojutimi owned and where Fatunmbi and Velazquez worked. According to the indictment in this case, Lutemi billed Medicare more than $8.3 million in claims, primarily for medically unnecessary power wheelchairs. Fadojutimi and Fatunmbi allegedly laundered Medicare funds in order to purchase fraudulent prescriptions for those power wheelchairs and pay illegal kickbacks to recruit Medicare beneficiaries. Fadojutimi was arrested this morning in Los Angeles, while Velazquez was arrested in Las Vegas. Fatunmbi is currently a fugitive being sought by federal authorities. 
Susanna Artsruni, 45, of North Hollywood, and Erasmus Kotey, 76, of Montebello, a licensed physician’s assistant, allegedly worked together to commit health care fraud out of a medical clinic on Vermont Avenue where they both worked. Kotey allegedly prescribed medically unnecessary DME, including power wheelchairs, for Medicare beneficiaries. Many of those power wheelchair prescriptions were then used by Artsruni’s DME company, Midvalley Medical Supply, to support fraudulent claims to Medicare. In only four months, the clinic and Midvalley billed Medicare more than $525,000 for these fraudulent claims. Artsruni has previously been convicted of health care fraud and was on pre-trial supervision at the time she allegedly laundered some of the proceeds of this fraud. Artsruni was arrested this morning, while Kotey self-surrendered. 
Three other DME cases were also charged, alleging fraudulent Medicare billing for medically unnecessary power wheelchairs that were sometimes never even delivered. In one case, Akinola Afolabi, 53, of Long Beach, the owner of Emmanuel Medical Supply, allegedly submitted more than $2.6 million in false and fraudulent billing to Medicare. In another case, Queen Anieze-Smith, 52, of Encino, and Abdul King-Garba, 47, of Westwood, the owners and operators of ITC Medical Supply, allegedly submitted more than $1.8 million in false and fraudulent billing to Medicare.

Shouldn't they have named their front operation Royal Medical Supply?
In the third case, Clement Etim Aghedo, 53, of Fontana, the owner of Ace Medical Supply Company, allegedly submitted more than $1.8 in false and fraudulent claims to Medicare. Afolabi, Anieze-Smith, and King-Garba were all arrested this morning, while Aghedo self-surrendered. 
In the seventh case brought as part of today’s takedown, three defendants affiliated with Gardena-based ProMed Medical Transportation, an ambulance company, were charged with submitting more than $5.9 million in false claims to Medicare between 2008 and 2011. ProMed’s owner, Yaroslav Proshak, 45, of Valley Village; general manager Sharetta Wallace, 35, of Inglewood; and office manager and biller Sergey Mumjian, 40, of West Hollywood, submitted claims for medically unnecessary transportation services and then created fake documentation purporting to support those claims. Proshak, Wallace, and Mumjian were arrested this morning.

This press release would make the Statue of Liberty proud.

"How Immigration Can Hurt a Country" in theory, not just in reality

U. of Indiana economics professor Eric Rasmusen offers a theoretical model of "How Immigration Can Hurt a Country." 
Can immigration (or capital inflow) hurt the welfare of a country? Yes, if there are decreasing returns to the factor, as this little paper will explain. The idea is important, and probably is new -- at least, I couldn't fi nd it by a google search -- but an economics journal would say it is obvious, I think, so I probably will not try to publish it in a journal. I will post it on the web instead. I do hope it gets into the academic literature and the policy debates. If it is received favorably, I will tidy it up and put it into journal style, adding cites and superfluous generality, and checking my arithmetic. My target audience is trained economists even now, however. Please let me know if someone has already made the external diseconomy argument. I wouldn't be surprised if someone had done so back in the 1920's.

I've found that economic theory is a useful servant for understanding facts, but many bright people seem to view theory as the master to which their awareness of reality must be enslaved. For them, this paper might be an eye-opener.

Supreme Court upholds college affirmative action, mostly

Here's Volokh's Conspiracy on competing interpretations.

June 23, 2013

Surveillance or Megaphone: Which is more important?

Morris Dees wants you
All this talk about surveillance reminds me that ordinary people already can know a lot about the rich and famous, but what matters is less what’s knowable than the socially approved attitude we’re supposed to hold toward that person.

For example, there’s been plenty of information online for over a decade documenting that Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center is a pretty hilariously rotten guy. The more I read about good old Morris, the more I'm reminded of Gene Hackman hamming it up as sleazy Lex Luthor in the original Superman movies. 

But, who cares about the facts? Morris is widely believed to be a saint and a scholar because we are constantly told what a great guy he is. This member of the Direct Marketing Hall of Fame has no sense of shame, so all the revelations about him can't pry his fingers from the megaphone.

Front Page News!

You may have thought that gay marriage was the most important question of all time, but the real most important issue ever is just coming into view, as prominently featured yet again in the New York Times:
Agency Rules in Favor of Transgender First Grader 
By DAN FROSCH  6:13 PM ET 
A Colorado school district discriminated against a transgender student when it refused to let her use the girls’ bathroom, the state’s civil rights division said.

I just realized that it's been at least a month since the Times did a major story on that MMA fighter who is struggling for the right to beat up women. Isn't the right of ex-men to get paid to practice violence against women what this country is all about? Why the silence, NYT?

The Obama Campaign and Big Data

Strikingly accurate representation of demographic most targeted by Obama
Here's an NYT Magazine article about a bunch of Obama Campaign quants who have decided to make their fortunes by letting corporate America (e.g., the nice folks at Caesar's Palace) use the same Big Data Mind Control techniques that Obama used in 2012 to motivate unmotivated voters like the representative Obama-leaning couch-potato illustrated above.
Data You Can Believe In
The Obama Campaign’s Digital Masterminds Cash In
by Jim Rutenberg

Rutenberg is a political reporter, not a business reporter, so he tends to be blown away by the claims of ex-Obama staffers now starting up marketing data firms that they are radically out ahead of corporate America in their capabilities.
Grisolano and McLean and the others were part of a singular breakthrough in the field of television-ad buying, where about 50 percent of the campaign’s budget was spent, or more than $400 million. Previous campaigns would make decisions about how to direct their television-advertising budgets largely based on hunches and deductions about what channels the voters they wanted to reach were watching. Their choices were informed by the broad viewership ratings of Nielsen and other survey data, which typically led to buying relatively expensive ads during evening-news and prime-time viewing hours. The 2012 campaign took advantage of advanced set-top-box monitoring technology to figure out what shows the voters they wanted to reach were watching and when, resulting in a smarter and cheaper — if potentially more invasive — way to beam commercials into their homes. ...
The system gave Obama a significant advantage over Mitt Romney, according to Democrats and many Republicans (at least those who were not on Romney’s media team).

I think a more defensible argument is that at least the Obama staffers didn't loot the campaign the way some of Romney's consultants did. Obama took lots of functions in-house and paid salaries, while Romney hired consultants and paid their marked-up fees.
Now A.M.G.’s founders say the company is at the forefront of a move to turn upside down the way the $60-billion-a-year television-ad market has functioned since its start. And they hope to get very rich in the process.  

This article's notion that political marketers are so much more sophisticated than consumer marketers that the young guns of Obama 2012 will "disrupt" the way big business operates is not very plausible sounding. Political marketing has always lagged behind corporate marketing because of problems like lack of continuity and reliance on fashionable gurus who have gotten hot lately. The Obama campaign was able to maintain a core from 2008 to 2012, while poor Romney just hired a bunch of fast-talking consultants who saw him as their fat cat chance to pay for their kids' college educations off of a few months' work.
But Gershkoff had come upon a cache of data that all the strategists would come to appreciate. She had contracted with a relatively new firm called Rentrak that was competing with Nielsen and was buying up real-time, raw viewing data directly from cable and satellite companies that had nearly 20 million set-top boxes in eight million homes. When Gershkoff told Grisolano, he was thrilled. Rentrak’s huge new trove of data, he surmised, could help him find out with relative certainty what shows were being delivered to the homes of the roughly 15 million persuadable voters Wagner’s department had identified.  
Fortunately, there happened to be a rare expert in set-top-box data, named Carol Davidsen, working in the cave. ... Her previous employer, Navic Networks, was a very early pioneer in the field of set-top-box data collection. And she was one of the early programmers to figure out how to make a television, designed as a one-way path for sending programming into American homes, relay information back about what exactly a viewer was watching. 
Davidsen determined that Rentrak could roughly do what Grisolano wanted it to do: produce data that could be checked against Wagner’s list of most-persuadable voters to find matches. Rentrak had access to the set-top boxes in the homes of thousands of the targeted voters in every competitive market of every swing state.

This sounds like science fiction, right? Wow, the Obama campaign must have been light-years ahead of corporate America: they're capturing  data on what people were watching from set-top cable boxes!

Except I was doing exactly that for the BehaviorScan market research service on the Procter & Gamble account in 1983-85. For about 30,000 volunteer consumers, we knew every single thing they bought at every supermarket and drug store in town, plus every TV show and commercial they watched in their homes, and we could send different commercials to individual houses via their cable set-top-box.

The set-top box recorded the exact channel each panelist was tuned to by the second. We then employed workers to watch videotapes of all TV shows shown in those markets and write down which commercials started when.

My friend Chris managed the night shift of people who had been attracted to the notion of a job being paid to watch TV. Unsurprisingly, when they found out they had to fast-forward through the shows and only watch the commercials, they weren't the most diligent workers. Every time Chris went to the bathroom, they'd run off to a different floor and party. But they weren't hard to track down because they'd immediately turn their boomboxes up loud and start to boogie. He fired a few and they filed racial discrimination complaints with the EEOC. A federal investigator came by, but he turned out to be a fellow Irish-American Chicagoan; Chris's boombox story cracked him up and he closed the case.
(For instance, Rentrak had 100,000 people in its Denver sample, some 20,000 of whom were on the Obama list; Nielsen had a total of 600 people in Denver.) 

But there are lots of market research firms far more ambitious than Nielsen is with its TV ratings. The reason Nielsen always has only a tiny sample size and lags far behind in technology is because it has a monopoly on TV ratings and people seem to like it that way: they like having one set of ratings that sound authoritative because there aren't any competitors. Arbitron, which long had a radio ratings monopoly tried to get into the TV ratings game way back in the 1980s, but there wasn't much client enthusiasm.

Ad-buyers and ad-sellers both agree to use the same set of numbers, even if the quality to cost ratio is mediocre. One problem is that if you switch ratings companies then there will inevitably be changes in ratings due to the switchover, which drive clients crazy. Do you want to be the marketing research executive at CBS who has to explain to Les Moonves and Chuck Lorre that the change in ratings of Two and a Half Men from last week to this week that you are reporting is probably not real, but is just caused because you dumped Nielsen and signed up with a new lower-cost competitor that does things a little differently? For various reasons like these, monopolies or cartels in the various ratings business are remarkably defensible and enduring.
... The campaign determined that two of the top shows to buy were 1 a.m. repeats of “The Insider” and afternoon episodes of “Judge Joe Brown” — shows that were far cheaper than the evening news or anything being shown on the networks in prime time.  

The unsettling finding of our 1980s Big Data business was that it wasn't readily apparent from this vast amount of information we collected on consumers that changes in TV advertising had much impact on viewers' purchasing behavior. When we started testing and tracking, most brand managers were convinced that they could boost sales for existing consumer packaged goods by doubling their ad budgets, but our unbelievably sophisticated real world laboratory tests seldom showed that was true. About the best we could come up with is that if you have some actual news to tell consumers -- e.g., you've added a breakthrough ingredient to your toothpaste that is endorsed by the American Dental Association because it's so effective -- yeah, then heavy advertising move the needle. But for most famous old products, where all you have to tell consumers is the same old same old, more ads don't necessarily sell more product ...

This doesn't mean that TV advertising of consumer packaged goods is wasted. You certainly need advertising to get most new brands off the ground. After that, however, heavy advertising may mostly serve a deterrent effect of keeping out new entrants. Many CPG categories are something of a cartel, with the same famous brand names dominating decade after decade, in part because many CPG products work pretty satisfactorily and the CPG firms pay huge amounts of money to remind you that these products have long-established reputations as satisfactory.
In the end, an analysis by the Republican ad-buying firm National Media found that Obama paid roughly 35 percent less per broadcast commercial than Romney did.

To a lot of GOP consultants, who get paid because they pocket 15% of the cost of buying ads, the money wasted by the Romney campaign may have been less a bug than a feature.

The article goes on to lament how the one-time Obama saints are now selling out to corporate America, but the Obama employees getting rich off corporate America tomorrow seems more effective than the Republican consultants' tendency to try to get rich off the candidate today.

The big difference between what the Obama campaign could do in 2012 and what CPG marketers could do a generation before is in data mining social media, pushing the already well-pushed envelope of privacy.
The campaign didn’t go into much detail, at the time, about exactly how it used Facebook. But St. Clair put it in fairly stark terms when I talked to him at A.M.G.’s temporary offices in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in April. They started with a list that grew to a million people who had signed into the campaign Web site through Facebook. When people opted to do so, they were met with a prompt asking to grant the campaign permission to scan their Facebook friends lists, their photos and other personal information. In another prompt, the campaign asked for access to the users’ Facebook news feeds, which 25 percent declined, St. Clair said. 
Once permission was granted, the campaign had access to millions of names and faces they could match against their lists of persuadable voters, potential donors, unregistered voters and so on. “It would take us 5 to 10 seconds to get a friends list and match it against the voter list,” St. Clair said. They found matches about 50 percent of the time, he said. But the campaign’s ultimate goal was to deputize the closest Obama-supporting friends of voters who were wavering in their affections for the president. “We would grab the top 50 you were most active with and then crawl their wall” to figure out who were most likely to be their real-life friends, not just casual Facebook acquaintances. St. Clair, a former high-school marching-band member who now wears a leather Diesel jacket, explained: “We asked to see photos but really we were looking for who were tagged in photos with you, which was a really great way to dredge up old college friends — and ex-girlfriends,” he said. 
The campaign’s exhaustive use of Facebook triggered the site’s internal safeguards. “It was more like we blew through an alarm that their engineers hadn’t planned for or knew about,” said St. Clair, who had been working at a small firm in Chicago and joined the campaign at the suggestion of a friend. “They’d sigh and say, ‘You can do this as long as you stop doing it on Nov. 7.’ ”

No bias there! It probably didn't hurt that Facebook billionaire Chris Hughes had been an Obama campaign official in 2008.

Back in the BehaviorScan day, we only used data from volunteers who signed up in writing, we gave them money and prizes for it, and we certainly didn't extract data from their friends.

My presumption is that being able to show more closely targeted ads to the average individual is modestly profitable, but quickly gets countered, and life goes on.

In contrast, knowing a lot about certain individuals can be hugely profitable. If you happened to have the metadata from the CEO of General Electric's cellphone calls, you could probably make some serious money in the stock market anticipating mergers and acquisitions.

If you had happened to have, say, the cellphone metadata of Senator Larry Craig (R-Wide Stance), you could also make money. Hmmmhmmmhmm, the Senator spends a lot of time in public men's rooms ... maybe we should send him some coupons to promote our client's intestinal relief product? Or ... maybe ... we should blackmail him into inserting an obscure clause into tax legislation that will make us zillions of dollars? Which one sounds like a higher ROI?

Trende: "The Case of the Missing White Voters, Revisited"

At Real Clear Politics, Sean Trende returns to the subject of the lousy white turnout in the 2012 election using the recent Census Bureau results from its post-election survey of who voted. His analysis is much like mine in VDARE.com, although he attempts to correct for "over-response bias" of people who lied that they voted when they didn't. (My hunch would be that blacks are most likely to boast they voted when they didn't actually get around to it, but nobody seems to have anyway to prove any theories like this, so I just use the Census Bureau's unadjusted shares of the total vote as the most respectable numbers.)
"The Case of the Missing White Voters, Revisited" 
As I noted earlier, if you correct the CPS data to account for over-response bias, it shows there were likely 5 million fewer whites in 2012 than in 2008. When you account for expected growth, we’d find 6.5 million fewer whites than a population projection would anticipate. ...
2. These voters were largely downscale, Northern, rural whites. In other words, H. Ross Perot voters. 
Those totals are a bit more precise and certain (and lower) than my estimates from November of last year. With more complete data, we can now get a better handle regarding just who these missing white voters were. ... 
For those with long memories, this stands out as the heart of the “Perot coalition.” That coalition was strongest with secular, blue-collar, often rural voters who were turned off by Bill Clinton’s perceived liberalism and George H.W. Bush’s elitism. They were largely concentrated in the North and Mountain West: Perot’s worst 10 national showings occurred in Southern and border states. His best showings? Maine, Alaska, Utah, Idaho, Kansas, Nevada, Montana, Wyoming, Oregon and Minnesota. 
We can flesh this out a bit more by running a regression analysis, which enables us to isolate the effects of particular variables while holding other variables constant. We’ll use county-level data ...

In his regression analysis, he's looking at total change in turnout (all ethnicities) by county from 2008 to 2012. I would prefer instead to use total change in turnout from 2004 (the recent peak of white people's participation) to 2012.
For those who didn’t click over to the chart, we’re pretty confident that the voters were more likely to stay home if they resided in states that were hit by Hurricane Sandy, that were targeted by a campaign in 2008, that had higher foreign-born populations, and that had more Hispanic residents. The latter result probably suggests a drop-off in rural Hispanic voters, who are overrepresented in an analysis such as this one. 

Texas has 254 counties, with an average population of about 100,000, each of which weigh in this analysis, while Los Angeles County, for instance, has about 10,000,000 million people.
We’re also pretty confident that the voters were more likely to turn out if they resided in counties with higher median household incomes, high population growth, a competitive Senate race in 2012, or that were a target state in 2012. 
Counties with higher populations of Mormons, African-Americans, and older voters also had higher turnout, all other things being equal. None of this is all that surprising. 
Perhaps most intriguingly, even after all of these controls are in place, the county’s vote for Ross Perot in 1992 comes back statistically significant, and suggests that a higher vote for Perot in a county did, in fact, correlate with a drop-off in voter turnout in 2012. 
What does that tell us about these voters? As I noted, they tended to be downscale, blue-collar whites. They weren’t evangelicals; Ross Perot was pro-choice, in favor of gay rights, and in favor of some gun control. You probably didn’t know that, though, and neither did most voters, because that’s not what his campaign was about. 
His campaign was focused on his fiercely populist stance on economics. He was a deficit hawk, favoring tax hikes on the rich to help balance the budget. He was staunchly opposed to illegal immigration as well as to free trade (and especially the North American Free Trade Agreement). He advocated more spending on education, and even Medicare-for-all. Given the overall demographic and political orientation of these voters, one can see why they would stay home rather than vote for an urban liberal like President Obama or a severely pro-business venture capitalist like Mitt Romney.

I wasn't that impressed by the notion of Ross Perot as President (only Saturday Night Live pointed out that he was clearly going through a major manic depressive cycle in 1992, when he disappeared for the summer muttering about the CIA trying to ruin his daughter's wedding by claiming she was a lesbian). But I am impressed by Perot voters, whose reasonably coherent and patriotic economics scared the Establishment into making some decisions that contributed to the rising wage prosperity of the later 1990s.
3. These [missing white] voters were not enough to cost Romney the election, standing alone. 
But while this was the most salient demographic change, it was probably not, standing alone, enough to swing the election to Obama. After all, he won the election by almost exactly 5 million votes. If we assume there were 6.5 million “missing” white voters, than means that Romney would have had to win almost 90 percent of their votes to win the election. 
Give that whites overall broke roughly 60-40 for Romney [the Reuters poll showed 57.1 to 41.1 for Romney], this seems unlikely. In fact, if these voters had shown up and voted like whites overall voted, the president’s margin would have shrunk, but he still would have won by a healthy 2.7 percent margin. 
At the same time, if you buy the analysis above, it’s likely that these voters weren’t a representative subsample of white voters. There were probably very few outright liberal voters (though there were certainly some), and they were probably less favorably disposed toward Obama than whites as a whole. Given that people who disapprove of the president rarely vote for him (Obama’s vote share exceeded his favorable ratings in only four states in 2012), my sense is that, if these voters were somehow forced to show up and vote, they’d have broken more along the lines of 70-30 for Romney.

Okay, but in addition, in an election where white people who were apathetic in 2012 about Romney were fired up to vote, almost certainly the GOP would have won some marginal Obama voters.
This still only shrinks the president’s margin to 1.8 percent, but now we’re in the ballpark of being able to see a GOP path to victory (we’re also more in line with what the national polls were showing).

In this scenario, boosting the GOP share of the white vote from 58% to 60% percent, say, gives the GOP candidate the national popular vote victory. And there are obvious Electoral Vote opportunities where a lot of whites held their noses and voted for Obama in the north-central Slippery Six, each of which Romney lost narrowly because he didn't get a high enough share of the white vote: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa. These states are not likely to be flooded with newly voting Hispanics by 2016, either.
In fact, if the African-American share of the electorate drops back to its recent average of 11 percent of the electorate and the GOP wins 10 percent of the black vote rather than 6 percent (there are good arguments both for and against this occurring; I am agnostic on the question), the next Republican would win narrowly if he or she can motivate these “missing whites,” even without moving the Hispanic (or Asian) vote. 
4. The GOP faces a tough choice. 
Of course, it isn’t that easy. Obama won’t be on the ticket in 2016, and the likely Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, could have a greater appeal to these voters (current polling suggests that she does). But there are always tradeoffs, and Clinton’s greater appeal to blue-collar whites, to the extent it holds through 2016, could be offset by a less visceral attachment with young voters, college-educated whites and to nonwhites than the president enjoys. 
But the GOP still has something of a choice to make. One option is to go after these downscale whites. As I’ll show in Part 2 [not yet published], it can probably build a fairly strong coalition this way. Doing so would likely mean nominating a candidate who is more Bush-like in personality, and to some degree on policy. This doesn’t mean embracing “big government” economics or redistribution full bore; suspicion of government is a strain in American populism dating back at least to Andrew Jackson. It means abandoning some of its more pro-corporate stances. This GOP would have to be more "America first" on trade, immigration and foreign policy; less pro-Wall Street and big business in its rhetoric; more Main Street/populist on economics. 
For now, the GOP seems to be taking a different route, trying to appeal to Hispanics through immigration reform and to upscale whites by relaxing its stance on some social issues.

By the way, economic populism isn't a bad way to not turn off Hispanic voters. In contrast, the conventional wisdom among the Republican Brain Trust that Romneyism plus amnesty equals success with Hispanics is the kind of thing that makes sense only if your main Hispanic friend is former Commerce Secretary-turned-amnesty-advocate Carlos "Hidalgo-American" Gutierrez.

Visas as civil rights for foreigners

Here's a squib in the New York Times that inadvertently reveals much about Establishment prejudices on immigration.
Supporters of Immigration Bill Offer Amendment Focused on Women 
By JULIA PRESTON 
Saying the immigration overhaul bill now before the Senate would discriminate against future immigrants who are women, 13 female senators have introduced an amendment that would make it easier for foreign women to come to the United States under a new merit system in the legislation. 
The amendment is part of a new effort by supporters of the bill to attract votes by framing immigration as a women’s issue. Its lead sponsors are two Democrats, Senator Mazie K. Hirono of Hawaii and Senator Patty Murray of Washington, and sponsors also include a Republican, Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. ...

The amendment the senators introduced late Wednesday would make a major change to the bill now on the Senate floor. It would create a separate tier for professions typically held by women, under a new merit-based point system for future immigration that would place more emphasis on job qualifications and less on family ties, which are the priority in the current system. 
The senators said women in foreign countries often do not have the same educational and career opportunities as men. “We should not cement those inequalities into our immigration laws,” Ms. Hirono said.

Sure, argue the 13 female Senators, these foreign women are uneducated and unskilled, but, you see, that's the fault of their own countries, so, ergo, therefore, and hence, it's America's responsibility to rectify this discrimination by handing out more visas. To not do so would be discriminatory, and that's the worst thing in the world.
Ms. Murkowski (R-Her Daddy) said the amendment would open up more visas for women in health care professions, to alleviate chronic shortages in this country.

Ah, the chronic shortage of Americans willing to change bedpans for less than the market rate of pay. This shortage is so chronic that I've been hearing all about it since the 1970s. It's almost as chronic as my money shortage. All my life, I've suffered from a chronic shortage of money, which I define as having less money than, all else being equal, I wish I had. I think the Gang of Eight should do something about that.

June 22, 2013

Haaretz: "In U.S. snooping affair, Israeli firms at risk"

If you were to read the Israeli and American Jewish press, you would get the impression that Israelis and American Jews tend to be well above average in terms of being influential, powerful, and intimately involved in much that's in the news. 

Fortunately, we have the American mainstream media to completely ignore for us overly interesting angles in giant stories, such as Israeli involvement in the current surveillance scandal. Kevin MacDonald points to this June 10, 2013 story from Haaretz:
In U.S. snooping affair, Israeli firms at risk 
Controversy over government surveillance that erupted last week over the NSA's PRISM surveillance program may lead to tougher standards for telecommunications gear like that developed, manufactured in Israel....
Behind the scenes are a host of Israeli companies that have almost certainly taken part in the program as suppliers of technology. They may yet find themselves in the maelstrom, warns Nimrod Kozlovski, head of Tel Aviv University’s program for cyber studies.... 
The concern is not just that the local government is spying on its citizens but that the manufacturers themselves have the ability to spy from afar. 
Telecommunications systems almost always feature components that can be operated remotely so that software can be updated and routine maintenance chores can be conducted. … But these same systems can be used to penetrate the user country’s communications network as well. With the United States at the center of the world’s Internet traffic that problem is magnified. 

Two days earlier, on June 8, 2013, Haaretz (as reprinted in the Jewish Daily Forward of NYC) had headlined:
What was the Israeli involvement in collecting U.S. communications intel for NSA? 
Israeli high-tech firms Verint and Narus have had connections with U.S. companies and Israeli intelligence in the past, and ties between the countries' intelligence agencies remain strong.

So, this kind of thing is interesting and respectable to ask about in Israel, but in the U.S. it's not, except in specifically Jewish publications. Why do you want to know things that Israelis know? What are you, curious? Are you some kind of curiousist? Why are you anti-ignorance?

Gang of Eight backer forms Gang of One, robs 19 banks

Police artist sketch
From the Dallas Morning News:
Farmers Branch immigrant-rights activist accused of being ‘Mesh Mask Bandit’

By DIANNE SOLÍS and TANYA EISERER Staff Writers

Updated: 22 June 2013 08:13 AM 
An immigrant rights activist from Farmers Branch is suspected of being a prolific bank robber known as the Mesh Mask Bandit, the FBI says. 
Mug shot, 6/21/13
Luis de la Garza, 59, appeared in federal court Friday in connection with the armed robbery of a Wells Fargo bank in April. Authorities believe he has robbed at least 18 other banks in nine area cities. 
... The witness who saw the man without his mask before and after the robbery helped authorities with a sketch that the FBI circulated in May.... 
The witness at the Wells Fargo bank later identified de la Garza in a lineup, officials said.  ...
De la Garza, a Mexican immigrant, spoke out about immigration policies, including those in Farmers Branch, where he has lived for at least a decade. 

The American citizens of Farmers Branch, an inner ring suburb of Dallas, have repeatedly been sneered at in the national media for trying to take steps to lessen the inundation of illegal aliens in their town.
Gang of One in action
He was credited with developing a low-power Spanish-language television station, TeleAmerica, in the 1990s and had served on a prominent advisory committee of about 100 immigrants to the Mexican government’s Foreign Relations Ministry. 
While he was on probation in the tax evasion case, de la Garza requested permission to travel to Mexico City in 2006 because he had received an invitation to attend inauguration events for then President-elect Felipe Calderón. 
The court records included a copy of the invitation. It appears he received permission to take the trip. 
Juan Hernandez, an immigrant adviser to former Mexican President Vicente Fox, said he was surprised by the allegations against de la Garza. 

From the Wikipedia article on Luis de la Garza:
In 1994 he founded TeleAmerica a Spanish speaking television station that broadcasted 24 hours and served the Hispanic community giving them a venue to openly express their opinion.[citation needed] A couple of years later it became TeleAmerica Spanish Network, broadcasting to different states through independent stations but still under the TeleAmerica logo.[citation needed] 
De la Garza was not good to his employees. On payday, his employees at TeleAmerica would have to rush to the bank to cash paychecks because there were always insufficient funds in the account. 
By then Luis de la Garza had become very politically active within the Hispanic community and his Show Foro 44 had made a name for itself. Considering the needs of immigrants in the United States,[1] he began working with Mexican Governors,[2] Senators, Congressmen and the President to establish a relationship between the Mexicans in Mexico and the Mexicans in the United States.[3] Luis de la Garza also became very active with American politicians, meeting with Senators and Congressmen to change the lives of many immigrants that had no voice, peacefully protesting against radical law proposals and organizing the Hispanic community to become politically active.
Foro 44 (originated from TeleAmerica's flagship station KLEG-LP), served as a platform for interviewing personalities live, such as President George W. Bush, President Vicente Fox,[4] Mexican Governors, Congressmen and Senators from Mexico and the United States. Never forgetting the importance of local issues his show always has kept a deep commitment to education, health, business and local politics. 
Luis de la Garza having always been very business oriented founded a new organization (RETO Group/ Representacion Total) with this organization he has been able to establish direct communication with business people in Mexico and the United States creating new opportunities for development and investment. 
Luis de la Garza has been the recipient of many recognition awards, including one of the most influential media personalities by Hispanic 100 two times in a row[5] ,[6] The Latino Peace officers, Who’s Talking (issued by the Dallas Morning News as one of the best Talk Shows), The Venegas Foundation, The Arlington Hispanic Advisory Council, LULAC and the Citizens Award (presented by the Dallas Police) just to name a few, Mr. de la Garza is a speaker on immigration issues, he has been invited and participated in national and international forums, radio and television shows, campaigns, conventions, schools and private functions.
Activist cuts out middlemen
In 2006, Luis de la Garza took a break from media and but not from politics, he is currently founding a new television station, hosting his radio talk show ConSentido[7] and very active as a businessman creating new projects, such as manufacturing license plates while in prison for bank robbery, and building bigger bridges between Mexicans in Mexico and Mexicans in the United States. Because he believes that the only way to change things is to participate, be active and always create for future generations. 

I suspect "such as manufacturing license plates while in prison for bank robbery" is a very recent interpolation in Wikipedia.

From a 2008 article on the Republican National Convention:
Despite Anti-Immigrant GOP, Some Latinos Are Sticking With McCain

Written by Martín Martínez 
Posted on 2008-09-12 
For Texas delegate Luis de la Garza, immigration reform is the best weapon McCain has to attract the Latino vote, one he will continue to use even if his party rebels against him.  
"McCain is always going to support immigration reform and he won't rest until he sees Congress approve it because he knows very well that it's necessary to fix the immigration system, even if that costs him enemies in his own party, and also because, being a Senator from Arizona, he knows the needs of our people first-hand," De la Garza explained.  
... "No politician or candidate understands the needs of the Latino community better than McCain. That's why he's committed himself not just to naturalizing 12 million undocumented immigrants but also to providing the tools Latinos need to get ahead in all aspects of life in this country," De la Garza said. 

Note, that I can't prove at the moment that this is the same Luis de la Garza from Texas, but whoever this one is, he is an acute judge of Senator McCain, perhaps as an illustration of the rule of thumb that it takes one to know one.

June 21, 2013

Tiger Parents riot: "No fairness if you do not let us cheat."

Riot police assemble to rescue test proctors
Malcolm Moore reports from China for The Telegraph:
Riot after Chinese teachers try to stop pupils cheating 
What should have been a hushed scene of 800 Chinese students diligently sitting their university entrance exams erupted into siege warfare after invigilators tried to stop them from cheating. 
The relatively small city of Zhongxiang in Hubei province has always performed suspiciously well in China's notoriously tough "gaokao" exams, each year winning a disproportionate number of places at the country's elite universities. 
Last year, the city received a slap on the wrist from the province's Education department after it discovered 99 identical papers in one subject. Forty five examiners were "harshly criticised" for allowing cheats to prosper. 
So this year, a new pilot scheme was introduced to strictly enforce the rules. 
When students at the No. 3 high school in Zhongxiang arrived to sit their exams earlier this month, they were dismayed to find they would be supervised not by their own teachers, but by 54 external invigilators randomly drafted in from different schools across the county. 
The invigilators wasted no time in using metal detectors to relieve students of their mobile phones and secret transmitters, some of them designed to look like pencil erasers. 
A special team of female invigilators was on hand to intimately search female examinees, according to the Southern Weekend newspaper. 
Outside the school, meanwhile, a squad of officials patrolled the area to catch people transmitting answers to the examinees. At least two groups were caught trying to communicate with students from a hotel opposite the school gates. 
For the students, and for their assembled parents waiting outside the school gates to pick them up afterwards, the new rules were an infringement too far. 
As soon as the exams finished, a mob swarmed into the school in protest. 
"I picked up my son at midday [from his exam]. He started crying. I asked him what was up and he said a teacher had frisked his body and taken his mobile phone from his underwear. I was furious and I asked him if he could identify the teacher. I said we should go back and find him," one of the protesting fathers, named as Mr Yin, said to the police later. 
By late afternoon, the invigilators were trapped in a set of school offices, as groups of students pelted the windows with rocks. Outside, an angry mob of more than 2,000 people had gathered to vent its rage, smashing cars and chanting: "We want fairness. There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat." 
According to the protesters, cheating is endemic in China, so being forced to sit the exams without help put their children at a disadvantage.

These stories out of the East, such as the recent SAT administration being cancelled across South Korea due to rampant cheating, may add some insight into recent trends within the U.S.. In the four decades I've followed test scores by ethnicity, the biggest single change has been Asian-Americans pulling away in the 21st Century. Here's a graph from Unsilenced Science:

Rasmussen on CBO

Economist Eric Rasmusen responds to the Congressional Budget Office's optimistic assessment of the fiscal effects of Schumer-Rubio.   

In which I leave the house

I actually got dressed and left the house for once to visit the scene of investigative reporter Michael Hasting's fatal one-car crash southbound on Highland south of Melrose. That's on the border of Hollywood and posh Hancock Park. (To orient yourself, this is a mile south of the touristy corner of Highland and Hollywood Blvd., which is L.A.'s minor league version of Times Square's Bright Lights Big City.)

While my wife and I were standing there looking at the scorched palm tree in the grassy median of Highland that Hastings' C-class Mercedes came to rest against, I kept trying to picture the car hitting the tree, stopping immediately without skidding away, and then going up in a giant fireball (as Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill constantly assume is about to happen throughout the chase scene in "21 Jump Street"):
A blonde in a Lexus pulled up to discuss Hastings' death with us. "How could it happen?" she kept asking in her Persian accent, clearly not accepting the LAPD's "no foul play" conclusion. 

This got me thinking once again about how Los Angeles is different from the rest of the country. Everywhere else, the typical conspiracy theorist is pictured as, say, Randy Quaid's character in Independence Day: a burnt-out redneck Seventies survivor. 

In L.A., however, the typical conspiracy theorist is more likely a Near Eastern immigrant in a luxury car. The Persians, Arabs, Armenians, Israelis, Georgians, Bulgarians, and Russians, however, are not self-conscious about being conspiracy theorists. They don't see themselves as a despised and defiant minority. Back in the old country, nobody doubts that there are conspiracies. The only question is who can come up with the best conspiracy.

So, how could it happen? 

Ironically for somebody concerned about the growth of the Surveillance State, a papparazi (that epitome of the Surveillance Society) hanging out on Santa Monica Blvd. looking for, say, drunken celebrities recorded on his dashboard video camera Hastings blowing through a red light on Highland. A few minutes later, the papp arrived at the fireball.

How Hastings wound up on the median, though, is not obvious. Highland is dead straight and has two lanes each way (but they are narrow lanes). There has been speculation about dips, speedbumps, or potholes causing him to go airborne and lose control. Perhaps, but I watched maybe 100 southbound cars on Highland cross Melrose and continue past the burnt tree. It's unusually smooth and trouble-free for a Los Angeles street. 

Presumably, general reckless driving is to blame, I guess. 

Brave guys tend to be brave about dumb stuff like bad driving, too. Remember how Tom Wolfe kicks off The Right Stuff by reporting that 22% of jet fighter pilots in the postwar era died before the end of their 20-year terms of service? A few hundred pages later he admits that the majority of dead peacetime fighter pilots died in car crashes. (The services would usually write it up as a line of duty death so the widow could get the higher pension, on the grounds that drinking and driving fast is all part of the fighter pilot package.)

But why the huge fire following an impact that just didn't give me the impression that the car was going all that fast when it came to rest against the tree?

I suspected the key is that Hastings' car must have hit at least one fixed object before the tree, which probably did serious damage to the Mercedes (perhaps cutting the fuel line?) and slowed the car down before it hit the tree so that it didn't bounce away.

There's currently a traffic cone sitting on the middle of the grass median about 10 or 20 meters up toward Melrose (the direction from which Hastings came). In the LoudLabs video you can see water squirting straight up into the air from this spot. I don't know if what Hastings' car knocked off was exactly a fire hydrant. It might have been something smaller, such as a metal fixture for controlling sprinklers on the median. In any case, the object perhaps did serious damage to the left side and perhaps underside of the car before the final collision with the tree, and slowed the vehicle down. (Or maybe it was just the curb, but it's not a particularly large or jutting curb. If it was just the curb that set in motion the low-end luxury car's explosion, the widow Hastings should send her lawyer to have a long talk with the Mercedes-Benz corporation.)

Or at least that's what I thought until I tried to see what exactly the obstruction was on Google Maps Streetview. Instead, I just see metal plates flat to the ground. So, maybe I don't know what happened.

Border "Surge"

There's talk about amending the Schumer-Rubio immigration bill to fund a "border surge," like the short-term escalation in Iraq known as "the surge."

Of course, the notion of a "surge" against illegal immigration gives away the game: the elites are thinking about a brief change to delude the rubes so they can then get back to business as usual when the economy finally picks up and wages threaten to rise. 

Resisting illegal immigration has to be permanent.

June 20, 2013

Zimmerman jury: All women, no blacks (?)

Jack Cashil reports in WND:
In a case filled with anomalies, chalk up one more: Unless one of the six chosen jurors is booted from the case, George Zimmerman will have an all female jury. 
And if the Hispanic Zimmerman is considered white – he would not be on trial if he were not – his jury is all white as well. In any case, there are no blacks among the six jurors or four alternates.

Murder trials can go on a long time and lots of original jurors can drop out in favor of the alternates, as happened with the O.J. Simpson case, so that can change jury demographics over time.

But, it sounds like the two sides in the Trayvon Martin case might have had different opinions in picking the jury on the primacy of sex v. race in loyalty, rather like a photographic negative of the O.J case. As I wrote in Is Love Colorblind?
... probably the most disastrous mistake Marcia Clark made in prosecuting O. J. Simpson was to complacently allow Johnny Cochran to pack the jury with black women. As a feminist, Mrs. Clark smugly assumed that all female jurors would identify with Nicole Simpson. She ignored pretrial research indicating that black women tended to see poor Nicole as The Enemy, one of those beautiful blondes who steal successful black men from their black first wives, and deserve whatever they get.

Perhaps Zimmerman's lawyer feels that this is basically a racial trial, while the prosecutor feels the way to win is to reproduce the successful media tactic of eliciting maternal feelings for the 12-year-old dead child? That could lead to them effectively agreeing upon a jury of nonblack women. (Or is one mixed race?)

Michael Hastings' death: I'm glad that's all cleared up


From the Los Angeles Times:
No foul play suspected in Michael Hastings' death, LAPD says
I watched a lot of the Mannix detective series in 1969 and expensive cars were alway crashing and exploding into flames in nice parts of Los Angeles, so this quick "no foul play" conclusion makes perfect sense to me.

Nothing to see here, folks, move along, nothing to see here. It's just the top investigative journalist of his generation charbroiled in his new Mercedes, so keep moving. Hey, did you hear about Kim Kardashian? Now, that's what I call news.

By the way, the two pictures don't seem to be of the same exact spot (deciduous trees and streetlamp v. telephoto-compressed palm trees on the median). I presume the cops moved the car to get it, and the stench of roasted reporter, away from the houses seen in the first picture. Or something ...

Update: No, it looks like the same spot: in the fiery picture, the lone palm tree that car ran into is lost from view behind the flames, while in the daytime picture the telephoto compression is so extreme that it makes the palm trees on the median look omnipresent when they are actually spaced rather far apart. In the fire picture, the car looks like it's up against the streetlight, which is not in the median, but the streetlight is actually about 40 feet or so beyond the car -- the misleading element is that the streetlight looks taller (and thus closer) than it is because it's reflected in the water a neighbor sprayed on the car with his garden hose in an attempt to extinguish it.

Now, the notion of a 33-year-old war correspondent driving dangerously fast in his new car hardly sounds implausible. Still, it would be helpful if, say, that Taiwanese TV network that does animated re-enactments of Tiger Woods running into a fire hydrant would animate the official story so we can see if it looks reasonable.

To continue with the Mannix theme, which usually ended with the car chase with the bad guys plummeting off Mulholland Drive on top of the Hollywood Hills, the most reasonable way to dispose of a dead body in a fake car crash in this area is to put the dead man in the trunk of his car, drive it up to Mulholland, put him behind the wheel, and push the car off. That seems far more likely than staging a gigantic crash in an upscale flat neighborhood.

There are a lot more guard rails on Mulholland now than in Mannix's day, but, still, cars go over the cliff now and then. Three years ago, for example, somebody propelled Charlie Sheen's reportedly stolen car off Mulholland and it was found wrecked 400 feet down with no bodies to be seen anywhere.
Sheen's Mercedes did not, however, explode
The usual theory is that a seriously impaired Sheen drove it off, but the notion that he crawled back up through the sage brush and walked home seems hard to imagine. Maybe 20 years ago, but Charlie's body had a lot of miles on it by 2010.

Around that time, as we learned later during his self-destruction, Sheen requested and obtained a huge advance on his actor's salary from Chuck Lorre's Two and a Half Men. My off-hand guess would be that the destruction of Sheen's car was a message to Sheen from his underworld creditors to get serious about paying his debts, or else, but I'm just making that up.

Has anybody been by the site of Hastings' death on Highland south of Melrose and north of Clinton? I really ought to drive over there and take a look; but that would involve me leaving the house, so that's probably not going to happen.

Borjas: The Slowdown in the Economic Assimilation of Immigrants

Here's a new paper from Harvard economist George Borjas:
The Slowdown in the Economic Assimilation of Immigrants: Aging and Cohort Effects Revisited Again 
George J. Borjas 
NBER Working Paper No. 19116 
Issued in June 2013 
This paper uses data drawn from the 1970-2010 decennial Censuses to examine the evolution of immigrant earnings in the U.S. labor market. The analysis reveals that there are cohort effects not only in the level of earnings, with more recent cohorts generally having relatively lower entry wages, but also in the rate of growth of earnings, with more recent cohorts having a smaller rate of economic assimilation. Immigrants who entered the country before the 1980s typically found that their initial wage disadvantage (relative to natives) narrowed by around 15 percentage points during their first two decades in the United States. In contrast, the immigrants who entered the country after the 1980s have a negligible rate of wage convergence. Part of the slowdown in wage convergence reflects a measurable reduction in the actual rate of human capital accumulation. In particular, there has been a concurrent decline in the rate at which the newer immigrant cohorts are “picking up” English language skills. The study isolates one factor that explains part of these trends: The rate of increase in English language proficiency is significantly slower for larger national origin groups. The growth in the size of these groups accounts for about a quarter of the decline in the rates of human capital acquisition and economic assimilation.

Coulter: The Immigration-Domestic Snooping Nexus

From Human Events:
COULTER: AVOID THE NEED FOR SPYING USING ONE NOT-SO-WEIRD TRICK
By: Ann Coulter

Well, of course the government is spying on Americans! Look at the havoc caused by American citizens engaging in terrorism. 
There’s “American citizen” David Coleman Headley, who conspired with Pakistani military officers to commit the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, that left more than 160 people dead. 
Headley’s ancestors served under Gen. George Washington — no, I’m sorry, Headley was born “Daood Sayed Gilani” in Washington, D.C., to a Pakistani father. Like your typical American boy, he enjoyed TV’s “Happy Days” and murdering innocent people in terrorist attacks. 
There were the 20 “American” men from the Minneapolis area who joined a terrorist group in Somalia in 2008. I knew the Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party would cause trouble one of these days! 
No, wait — wrong again. We invited these foreign terrorists to immigrate here after the collapse of Somalia’s government in 1991. (And what a great deal for America that was! I’m so glad Obama’s doing it again with Syrian rebels.) 
These hardworking Somali immigrants produced — in the words of The New York Times — “the first known American suicide bomber”! Go U.S.A.! Who could have guessed that Shirwa Ahmed would be America’s first suicide bomber? (My money had been on a guy named “Jim Peterson.”) 
In addition to the first suicide bomber, the other American citizens who joined the terrorist group included Cabdulaahi Ahmed Faarax, Abdiweli Yassin Isse and Mahamud Said Omar. 
If you can’t trust “American citizen” Cabdulaahi Ahmed Faarax, what Americans can you trust these days? Or to quote Sen. Bob Casey, the mentally disabled Democratic senator from Pennsylvania: “It’s really disturbing — Americans becoming radicalized.” 
Then there were the six “New Jersey men” who plotted a terrorist attack on the Fort Dix military base in 2007. Using rocket-propelled grenade launchers, they estimated they could kill at least 100 soldiers. ...
The New Jersey men were named Mohamad Shnewer, Serdar Tatar, Agron Abdullahu, Dritan Duka, Eljvir Duka and Shain Duka. Four were from the former Yugoslavia, one was from Turkey and one was from Jordan. All were illegal aliens. 
But we needed them! As Marco Rubio’s staff recently told The New Yorker, American workers “can’t cut it.” 
If the government can spy on Cherry Hill’s Mohamad Shnewer, how can we draw the line at Fox News’ James Rosen and CBS News’ Sharyl Attkisson?
... Now we have to spy on Americans because of all the imported Tsarnaevs and Zazis. We have created two huge problems where none existed before — domestic terrorism and government spying — all to help the Democrats win elections by changing the electorate. 

As well, there are all sorts of other important interest groups who benefit from the Tsarnaevs and Todashevs being in America. Look at the growth in the budget and mysterious powers under the command of four-star general Keith Alexander, head of CyberCommand. If you are a politician, who knows what dirt he's got on you ... so, going around making Ann's argument that we need to cut immigration so we can spy less domestically just might get Gen. Alexander, who likes his black budgets big, unhappy with you. Most politicians have guilty consciences, so they'd rather make sure Gen. Alexander is a happy camper.